Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Jane Austen’s comments about the Kentish gentry were not always enthusiastic and sometimes less than polite: “they called, they came and they sat and they went,” was her description of the visit by one group of well-born ladies. Of the daughters of another she wrote, “Caroline is not grown at all coarser than she was, nor Harriet at all more delicate.” Again: “Ly Elizth for a woman of her age & situation, has astonishingly little to say for herself, & . . . Miss Hatton has not much more.” A Miss Fletcher, one of the many young women with whom she was supposed to make friends, had in her favour that she had enjoyed Camilla, but not much more; she seemed ready to believe the only interesting people in Canterbury were the young army officers. And family evenings at Godmersham could be soporific: “I guess that Elizth. works, that you read to her, & that Edward goes to sleep,” suggested Jane to Cassandra when she was at Godmersham in December 1798.

  None of Edward’s many in-laws and their neighbours seem to have become her regular correspondents; instead, the closest friend she made in Kent was a Godmersham employee, the governess Anne Sharp. In Miss Sharp she found a truly compatible spirit. She was delicate in health, clever, keen on acting and quick enough with her pen to write a play for the children to perform; it was called Pride Punished or Innocence Rewarded , and was put on, although only to amuse the servants. And she was obliged to earn her bread by the only possible means, the hard labour of teaching. Jane took to her at once, and formed a lasting friendship with her; and although Anne Sharp left Godmersham in 1806, and worked mostly in the north of England afterwards, the two women kept up a regular correspondence.

  Miss Sharp became “my dearest Anne.” In 1809, feeling rather “languid and solitary” at Godmersham, Jane could not help recalling a much more animated time when Miss Sharp had been present. Jane worried about her circumstances, and invited her to stay more than once; and she did manage to get her to Hampshire at least once, in the summer of 1815. She sent her copies of her books and cared for her opinion of them, some of which we know: Pride and Prejudice the favourite, Mansfield Park excellent, Emma somewhere between. Jane worried about her as she might about a sister. On one occasion she was concerned enough for her to express the desperate romantic wish that one of her employers, the widower Sir Wm. P. of Yorkshire, would fall in love with his children’s governess: “I do so want him to marry her! . . . Oh! Sir Wm—Sir Wm—how I will love you, if you will love Miss Sharp!”10 Sir William, needless to say, did not oblige; neither he nor Miss Sharp were figures of romance, and it would take a later novelist to marry a working governess to her employer.

  It was Jane, not anyone at Godmersham, who wrote to Miss Sharp to inform her when her erstwhile employer, Elizabeth Austen, died. Jane wrote one of her last letters to her dearest Anne; and after Jane’s death, Cassandra felt it right to send Miss Sharp—as she still called her—a lock of her sister’s hair and a few mementoes. The modest nature of the gifts underlines the poverty and thrift all three women took for granted: one was a bodkin that had been in Jane’s sewing kit for twenty years. It was no doubt treasured for another thirty. Miss Sharp lived on into the 1850s. She was found “horridly affected but rather amusing” by James Austen’s son, a judgement that recalls Phila Walter’s description of Jane Austen herself as “whimsical and affected.” It seems that in Kent, Jane found a semblable and made her into one of her very few close friends; someone who was neither rich nor particularly happy, but who was entirely congenial. What’s more, she was not shared with the family; she was entirely her own friend. That she was also a working woman who was later to set up and run her own boarding school in Everton suggests a good deal about what interested and attracted Jane Austen.

  To appear whimsical and affected is a common form of self-defence. Silence is another. Jane Austen’s silences are especially problematical because it is hard to know how much they are real silences, how much the effect of Cassandra’s scissors. Her silence about politics is famous, and generally taken to represent agreement with the Tory views of her family. As a child, she scribbled “Nobly said! Spoken like a Tory!” in the margin of Goldsmith’s History of England, but it is her only known rallying cry. After her death, a niece, trying to recall what opinions she had expressed on public events, was unable to think of “any word or expression” relating to them; and if she did keep her Tory loyalties, they did not extend to liking the local Tory MP.11

  Politics were of the masculine world, apart. So were field sports. Henry declared confidently that Cowper was her favourite moral writer in verse, and especially his long poem The Task, which she could indeed quote from memory; but she kept quiet about Cowper’s detestation of field sports and their cruelty: “the savage din of the swift pack . . . detested sport,/That owes its pleasures to another’s pain,/ That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks/Of harmless nature.”12 Living as she did among brothers and friends for whom hunting, coursing and shooting were favourite pursuits, it would have been awkward to invoke her favourite poet’s views to them. Henry hardly had a gun out of his hand when he was at Godmersham, all Edward’s sons were brought up to field sports, and James and his son were passionate about hunting; so if, privately, she shared Cowper’s feelings, she chose not to say so. The only mentions of field sports in her letters are uncritical. In Mansfield Park she sends Edward Bertram and Henry Crawford hunting together, and she is sympathetic to ten-year-old Charles Blake’s excitement about his first hunt, in The Watsons. There is no evidence that Jane Austen herself was ever at a meet; but loyalty to her brothers appears either to have overborne or at least silenced Cowper’s moral teaching.

  Women’s rights were another matter on which she kept quiet. Nobody could live through the 1790s without being aware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 1792 and caused a furore; but its opening chapter was not best calculated to appeal to a parson’s daughter with two brothers in the navy and, from 1793, one in a militia regiment. A Vindication begins with an attack on the monarchy and goes straight on to the army: “a standing army is incompatible with freedom”—“every corps is a chain of despots”—“the needy gentleman, who is to rise, as the phrase turns, by his merit, becomes a servile parasite or vile pander.” So much for Henry. Next the navy: “the naval gentlemen, come under the same description, only their vices assume a different and a grosser cast . . . mind is equally out of the question”: that was for Francis and Charles. Then the Church: “the blind submission imposed at college to forms of belief serves as a novitiate to the curate, who must obsequiously respect the opinion of his rector or patron, if he mean to rise in his profession. Perhaps there cannot be a more forcible contrast between the servile dependent gait of a poor curate and the courtly mien of a bishop. And the respect and contempt they inspire render the discharge of their separate functions equally useless.”13 This was for her father, her brother James, and half their cousins and friends.

  It was out of the question that she would endorse any of these sentiments. This at any rate is the first response. Thinking again, Austen’s own presentation of certain army officers, and her portraits of some clergymen as uncharitable, snobbish and sycophantic, suggests she might not entirely dissent from them. And Wollstonecraft’s central arguments for the better education and status of women must at the very least have caught her attention. Add to this her ownership of Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, and we can be certain she was aware of them. Bage was a radical and “scarcely a Christian” (in his own words), outspoken in his support for Wollstonecraft’s claims for women, which are invoked and approved by his hero.14 Hermsprong indeed challenges every aspect of Tory thinking, as a philosophical American who believes in equality, simplicity and plain speaking as well as women’s rights, and confronts the English class system in the shape of an unregenerate old West Country peer and his corrupt entourage of priest, lawyer and mistress. The great charm of the book is in the dialogue, which glints and sparkles with cleverness, much of it in the mouth of Hermsprong’s chief
ally Maria Fluart, a young woman of independent mind, quick tongue and a great capacity for upsetting the plans of the peer. When he demands a kiss and complains of her resistance, she exclaims, “A kiss! Lord bless me, I thought, from . . . the mode of your attack, you had wanted to undress me.” Hermsprong and Fluart use frank speaking as a weapon against opponents accustomed to polite lies and social forms, and his frank speakers carry the day. That particular opposition was taken up by Austen in Sense and Sensibility, with different results. Her formal silence on the position of women is qualified by the way in which her books insist on the moral and intellectual parity of the sexes; and her delighted remark about the young Oxford man who “has heard that Evelina was written by Dr. Johnson” signals her awareness of the situation addressed by Wollstonecraft and Bage.15

  If she is not silent about religion, she is quiet. Religion is there, as you would expect for the daughter of the parsonage, an essential part of the fabric of her life. It was not something to be questioned or investigated, and never a source of wonder or terror, as it was for Johnson and Boswell. Family prayers, sermons and the sacrament are occasionally mentioned in the letters, but religion is chiefly, and silently, associated with the duty of charity to the poor; more of a social than a spiritual factor. No one prays in her novels, no one is shown in church, or seeking spiritual guidance either from God or a clergyman. Marianne Dashwood, in the depths of misery and contrition, speaks of making atonement to God and regulating and checking her love for Willoughby “by religion, by reason, by constant employment,” but we are not shown her religion in action. More is made of Fanny Price’s faith, which gives her courage to resist what she thinks wrong; it also makes her intolerant of sinners, whom she is ready to cast aside, just as Mr. Collins recommends that the Bennets should cast aside the sinful Lydia and Wickham. Austen the novelist was interested in the way religion could be invoked in different causes and practised in different styles; about inner spiritual struggles she has nothing to say.

  14

  Travels with My Mother

  Mrs. Austen gave a very frank personal reason for welcoming Mary Lloyd as James’s wife in 1797. “I look forward to you as a real comfort to me in my old age, when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire, & Jane—the Lord knows where.” There is something more than uncertainty in the dash and the “Lord knows”: a throwing up of hands, an implied doubt, perhaps, as to whether Jane was likely to make either a comfortable wife or a comfort for her mother’s old age. Jane was unpredictable; elusive; and at least as formidable as Mrs. Austen herself in her mental and satirical powers. Mrs. Austen liked laughing at other people, but no one likes to be laughed at.

  As a mother, she wanted her daughters to marry. What else was there? Let them be as lucky as her niece Jane Cooper, who had married her splendid naval officer, already knighted for his successes against the French. Cousin Jane was now established as Lady Williams, however Jane Austen might mock “his Royal Highness Sir Thomas Williams”; and he was in a position to be good to Charles, who was happy to serve under his command. His wife was always made very welcome at Steventon. Family structures were strengthened, family advancement helped along, by such good marriages.

  Only nothing was secure. Within a few months of Mrs. Austen writing her letter to Mary, Tom Fowle was dead, and Cassandra no longer had a future in Shropshire. The following year Jane Williams was thrown from her gig by a runaway dray horse colliding with her as she drove along the lanes of the Isle of Wight. She was killed, leaving Sir Thomas a widower only six years after their wedding at Steventon.

  Jane Austen showed no sign of finding a husband, either among the local young men—Digweeds, Terrys, Portals, Harwoods, Tom Chute— or from further afield. She and Cassandra got on with all their old friends and their brothers’ friends, but it was sisterly stuff and led to nothing. Cass’s bereavement seemed to be pushing them both into— aunthood? spinsterhood? self-sufficiency?—it was hard to say. Their father took to referring to them, affectionately but collectively, as “the girls.” Their niece Anna, returned to Deane to live with her father and stepmother, remembered them from these years as an almost inseparable pair:

  I recollect the frequent visits of my two Aunts, & how they walked in wintry weather through the sloppy lane between Steventon & Dean in pattens, usually worn at that time even by Gentlewomen. I remember too their bonnets: because though precisely alike in colour, shape & material, I made it a pleasure to guess, & I believe always guessed right, which bonnet & which Aunt belonged to each other.1

  There is something depressing about the choice of identical bonnets for women in their mid-twenties, almost as though they were signalling that they were indivisible and indifferent to establishing any individual style.

  When they were not together, they wrote to one another constantly. “My Uncle is quite surprised at my hearing from you so often,” wrote Jane to Cass from Bath in 1799, a smooth remark with a rude implication, that their uncle was nosy and impertinent. Yes, they did write to each other very often; they needed to because they could speak to one another freely, their letters acting as safety valves for exasperation, dissipating anger and disappointment, helping them to brave the world as well as carrying gossip, jokes, travel notes and chat about their sad-sounding clothes. Cassandra sometimes tried her hand at a piece of formal prose, sending one such from Godmersham to Steventon in the winter of 1798; “your essay on happy fortnights is highly ingenious,” Jane told her, but she made no attempt at any essays or fine writing herself in her letters. They were only sharpening stones against which she polished the small knives of her prose.

  She will suddenly slip in a joke about a neighbouring clergyman’s wife, Mrs. Hall, giving birth to a dead child, “some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” E. M. Forster called this “the whinnying of harpies,” but surely it is much closer to the deliberate boyish bad taste of the juvenile stories, an impromptu piece of outrageousness that flew from the end of her pen, because Dr. Hall was so repellent. Further on in the same letter she talks comfortably of a new baby in the village, for whom there are baby clothes to be given from the parsonage.

  There are other surprises dropped in. “I do not wonder at your wanting to read first impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, & that so long ago.” She acknowledges the existence of her work, even though she never discusses it. The denial of initial capital letters in the title is like a lowering of the voice; she is almost unwilling to mention First Impressions. But there is no false modesty. It is worth rereading, in spite of the publishers’ rejection; later it would be worth rewriting.

  Both sisters and parents were at Godmersham in the summer of 1798, and Cassandra stayed on to help Elizabeth with a new baby while Jane travelled home with their parents. The next group of letters offers a detailed picture of her day-to-day relations with her parents; they also offer some more knife sharpening, as Jane turns her mother’s fussing about her own health into a running joke. Mrs. Austen began to feel unwell during the first lap of their complicated journey. She had to be ministered to, twice with medicinal bitters and several times with pieces of bread; once they reached the Dartford Inn she managed to recover enough to eat a dinner of beefsteaks and boiled chicken. She decided to share the double-bedded room they were offered with Jane, leaving Mr. Austen the peace of a single room. Jane makes no comment on this decision, although her next remark, “My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy,” must rate as a qualified expression of pleasure.

  At the inn her father settled down to read a novel while her mother sat by the fire. Jane meanwhile discovered that her boxes had disappeared, with all her money, letters and papers. The landlord thought they must have been put on a coach bound for Gravesend, on their way to the West Indies; and so they had, but were quickly pursued and rescued. As the family party journeyed on towards Staines the next morning,
her mother grew dramatically worse, with “heat in her throat” and “that particular kind of evacuation which has generally preceded her Illnesses.” Reaching Basingstoke at last, they went straight to Lyford, the family doctor, who prescribed laudanum, twelve drops to be taken at bedtime. Mrs. Austen then settled down for a cosy chat about the rival virtues of dandelion tea. They had, incidentally, just missed the excitement of another invalid passing through Basingstoke on his way to Windsor from Weymouth; the town had been full of local people gathered to cheer the King.2

  Mrs. Austen was extracted from Lyford’s and taken the last few miles home to Steventon. Jane was now in charge of the laudanum, rather pleased with the responsibility of dropping out the dose for her mother. When James appeared from Deane to greet the returning travellers, Mrs. Austen had another revival of spirits and another good talk before retiring to bed; once there, Mr. Lyford’s good laudanum knocked her out and kept her in bed all the next day. Jane and her father took their three thirty dinner alone. “How strange!” she wrote to Cass; strange to be giving the orders in the kitchen, strange to be the only Austen child left at home, sitting at the big table. Mr. Austen was considering how to help Frank, now in the Mediterranean, stuck at the rank of lieutenant; some paternal intervention in the shape of letters to the great and powerful was needed. Charles, at eighteen also a lieutenant, was eager to be transferred from home waters to a ship more likely to see active service. Mr. Austen wrote to Admiral Gambier, a connection of James’s first wife; Admiral Gambier consulted with Lord Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty and cousin of Henry’s retiring colonel and friend. His letters were effective, and by Christmas Frank was promoted to Commander and Charles moved to a frigate. Henry was also gazetted Captain and officially appointed Paymaster of the Regiment; it was a triple triumph for the fighting Austens.